weather data (Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration): 

The following are cleaned Matlab structure files with daily precipitation and temperature data worldwide for a period of almost 7 years. Date of access: Sep 8, 2015.

WeatherStations.mat: geographic location data for the weather stations that we use in our analysis. Headers: station id, latitude, longitude, if rain data is available (binary), if temperature data is available (binary). Note that the first two letters at station unique identifier refer to the country 2-letter abbreviation code. For example the unique identifier US0000000 refers to a weather station in United States. Look at countries.txt for a complete list of 2-letter abbreviations.

PRECIPITATION.mat: Matlab data structure with daily precipitation data for the weather stations of consideration. PRECIPITATION(1).STATION is the first station id, PRECIPITATION(1).PRCP has the precipitation values in tenths of mm for a period of almost seven years. The first column in PRECIPITATION(1).PRCP refers to the date (using Matlab�s datenumbers) while the second column is the precipitation values. Negative values are considered as missing data. NaN values refer to the cases that data are missing for the particular days.

TMAX_DATA.mat:  matlab structure with maximum daily temperature data for the weather stations of consideration. TMAX_DATA(1).STATION is the first station id, TMAX_DATA(1).TMAX has the temperature values in tenths of degree Celsius for a period of almost seven years. The first column in TMAX_DATA(1).TMAX refers to the date (using Matlab� s datenumbers) while the second column is the maximum temperature values. Values of -9999 or -999 are considered as missing data. NaN values refer to the cases that data are missing for the particular days.

TMIN_DATA.mat:  matlab structure with minimum daily temperature data for the weather stations of consideration. TMIN_DATA(1).STATION is the first station id, TMIN_DATA(1).TMIN has the temperature values in tenths of degree Celsius for a period of almost seven years. The first column in TMIN_DATA(1).TMIN refers to the date (using Matlab� s datenumbers) while the second column is the minimum temperature values. Values of -9999 or -999 are considered as missing data. NaN values refer to the cases that data are missing for the particular days.


We are also releasing the raw data files that we use to create the compact Matlab data structures. The csv files are categorized per year and per meteorological indicator. For example PRCP.csv includes all the daily precipitation for a period of almost seven years. The first column is the station unique identifier (see stations.txt file for the location of these stations), the second column is the date in the format yyyymmdd and in the third column is the recorded value. The recorded values are in tenths of mm for precipitation and tenths of degrees C for temperature. Values of -9999 or -999 are considered as missing data.

How to cite: Menne, M.J., I. Durre, R.S. Vose, B.E. Gleason, and T.G. Houston, 2012:  An overview of the Global Historical Climatology Network-Daily Database.  Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, 29, 897-910, doi:10.1175/JTECH-D-11-00103.1.




